Q: Could you help me please with an external rewriteable DVD ROM drive, which I bought some years ago, but now does not work properly? It has an indicator light, which turns on, and it blows air out the back but it will not play any disks. And it does not display an icon in ‘My Computer’. It is a device made up from a separate external drive case and an internal DVD drive, by a Bradford computer shop. There is no indication of a manufacturer name or model number. I have tried the drive with 2 different Dell Latitude laptops running Windows XP. It does not perform correctly on either one. When XP boots up, a message is displayed stating there is a hi-speed USB device plugged into a non hi-speed USB hub. But this has never prevented the drive working correctly before now.
I have tried the ‘add new hardware’ facility in Control Panel. I got a message stating the best driver for the device was already installed. I went into Device Manager. There is a yellow icon with a black exclamation mark, on the listed device entry. I clicked on the device entry and another window appeared with a message stating the device cannot start (code 10). I don’t know what error code 10 means. In Device Manager I tried updating the driver but again I eventually got the message that the best driver is already installed. Next I clicked troubleshoot, and tried uninstalling then reinstalling the device, as suggested. During the reinstalling ‘plug and play’ procedure a message popped up stating ‘found new hardware’ followed by another message stating there was a problem with the device and it might not work properly – which it didn’t. I tried some more things in Control Panel/Device Manager/installation procedure but I still cannot get the device working correctly. I even attempted to install Windows 98 drivers from the device’s accompanying CD. This generated a message stating the USB device has been installed completely.
I have run out of ideas. Do you have any suggestions for getting the device working correctly, or should I just invest in a new DVD drive?
A: The fact that the light comes on and the fan runs when the drive is connected and that it’s recognised as a USB device suggests that the enclosure is working correctly, so it’s probably a fault with the drive itself. Unfortunately Code 10 errors aren’t terribly helpful as they’re generated when Device Manager has insufficient information or doesn’t recognise the error generated by a driver. You could try the old trick of deleting the UpperFilters and LowerFilters entries in the registry (instructions on the Microsoft site). If that doesn’t work it’s pretty safe to assume that this is a hardware rather than software problem.
If you shop around, you can buy an internal DVD rewriter for less than £10 and five minutes with a screwdriver should be all that’s needed to fit this into your existing external case. It’s probably easiest therefore to simply replace the drive. External drive cases can be had for under £20 so you could replace the whole thing quite cheaply. Even if you don’t fancy the DIY option you should be able to buy a complete external drive for £40 or less.
External DVD drives needn’t be expensive
Originally featured in PCU119